What Are Biblical Values What The Bible Says On Ke... - (CHAPTER THREE The Bible and Gender)

CHAPTER THREE
The Bible and Gender
T
he priestly account of creation in Gen-
esis 1 reaches its climax in Genesis 1:27:
So God created humankind [Hebrew:
adam] in his image;
in the image of God he created them
[Hebrew: him];
male and female he created them.
We are given little by way of context to explain what it

means to be in the image of God. The word translated as “im-
Copyright © 2019. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
age” is commonly used for a statue. Gods were normally rep-

resented by statues in their temples in the ancient world. The
statue served to represent the presence of the god. It was “the
vehicle through which a god resides in the community, main-
tains a presence, receives worship and prayer, and can actively
participate in society.”1 In the ancient Near East the king was
often said to be the image of a god, although he necessarily
mediated the divine presence in a somewhat different way.
This was commonly said of the Egyptian pharaoh, who was
59
Collins, John. What Are Biblical Values? : What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues, Yale University Press, 2019.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fhchs-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5844743.
Created from fhchs-ebooks on 2023-09-12 15:30:55.
THE BIBLE AND GENDER
the visible form of a deity on earth. Mesopotamian kings were

said to be the images of various gods, Enlil, or Shamash, or
Marduk.2 This is not said of the king in the Hebrew Bible.
Here, humanity as such takes on this role. The image entails
a likeness, a point noted explicitly in Genesis 1:26: “Let us
make adam in our image, according to our likeness.” One as-
pect of the likeness lies in humanity’s dominion over all other
creatures: fish, birds, and land animals. This aspect of the cre-
ation story will concern us in a later chapter. For the present
let us focus on the last part of Genesis 1:27: “male and female
he created them.”
If humanity is created in the image and likeness of God,
and is also male and female, is God, too, male and female?
Not in the context of the Hebrew Bible, or of the Priestly
document (P). The idea that God might possess any form of
sexuality would have been foreign and repugnant to the
priestly writers.3 The statement that adam is created male and
female, then, must be understood as a qualification of the
likeness of God. Adam resembles God insofar as he shares in
the work of creation, but he does this by procreating, which
requires sexual differentiation.
The midrash Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic commentary from

perhaps around 600 CE, entertains the possibility that God
created Adam double-faced and then split him to make “two
backs.”4 Like the androgyne in Plato’s Symposium, “the pri-
meval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and
he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces,
looking in opposite ways.”5 The original adam would then be
both male and female. The midrash does not accept this pos-
sibility, and it has no basis in the biblical tradition.
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It is generally accepted that adam is the generic Hebrew

term for human being, including both males and females.6
Indeed, Genesis 5:2 declares that God called them adam. On
this understanding, male and female were created simultane-
ously, and both are in the image of God.
We cannot fail to notice, however, that the Hebrew uses
the singular pronoun when it speaks of the creation of adam
but the plural when it speaks of male and female. The second
account of creation in Genesis 2 clearly claims that the man
was created first and the woman was created from one of his
ribs. In the New Testament, Paul says that “a man ought not
to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of
God; but woman is the reflection of man” (1 Corinthians 11:7).
Nonetheless, it seems clear that Genesis 1 envisions binary
gender and accords both male and female the status of “image
of God.”
The assertion that women as well as men are created in the
image of God is generally, and rightly, hailed in the modern
world as remarkably progressive. But Genesis 1 is also held re-
sponsible for much of the gender trouble that has beset hu-
manity. The ambiguous use of the word adam, sometimes for
inclusive humanity but sometimes as the proper name of a

male, undoubtedly contributes to androcentrism, the tendency
to regard the male as normative and the female as a deviation.
In fairness we must note that androcentrism is in no way pecu-
liar to the Bible, and has flourished in cultures where the Bible
was unknown, but it is problematic in the biblical context
nonetheless. We will return to the problem of androcentrism
in the following chapter. But the declaration that humanity is
male and female has also lent support to gender polarization,
61
the assumption that human beings must be unambiguously

male or female, and to biological essentialism, the assumption
that being male or female entails qualities and dispositions far
beyond what is required by their different roles in procreation.7
It is also frequently cited as evidence that the divine plan is for
marriage to be between a man and a woman.
It is neither possible nor necessary here to enter into the
modern debates about gender and sexuality and the degree
to which they are either determined by biology or culturally
constructed.8 We must content ourselves with delimiting
what the Bible does and does not say on the subject. As we
noted already in Chapter 1, Genesis 1 is a highly schematic
account of creation, sketching its main outlines in a simplified
way. To distinguish day and night, or even evening and morn-
ing, is not to deny that there are dawn and dusk, when light
and darkness are not so clearly distinguished. Equally, to say
that human beings are male or female does not address the
question of whether there are variations in between. Andro-
gynes and transgender people are presumably also created by
God. Genesis says nothing whatsoever about distinctively
male or female characteristics or the ways men and women
should dress, wear their hair, and comport themselves.9 Dif-

ferentiation of social roles emerges in historical contexts later
in the Bible, but they are not specified in the initial account of
creation in Genesis 1. Neither does Genesis 1 specify that
marriage must be between a man and a woman, or indeed that
there should be an institution of marriage at all.
The second creation story, in Genesis 2–3, has more to say
on social roles and on the subject of marriage, but again, what
it has to say is by no means exhaustive. A man will cleave to his
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wife, and the two will become one flesh. But we quickly find
that many of the protagonists of the biblical narrative, such as
Abraham, Moses, and David, not to mention Solomon, cleaved
not just to one woman but to many.10 We will return to the
biblical view of marriage in Chapter 5. For the present it will
suffice to note that the biblical account of creation is by no
means definitive on the subject.
before homosexuality
The supposed biblical view that marriage is between a man

and a woman is most often invoked in the context of relations
between people of the same sex. At the outset, we should re-
member that the Bible does not have a concept of homosexu-
ality as a disposition or orientation. Homosexuality in this
sense is a modern construct, which arose in the late nineteenth
century.11 The term was introduced into the English language
in 1892, in a translation of a German work that had appeared
twenty years earlier.12 In the influential formulation of Michel
Foucault:
As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was
a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing
more than the judicial subject of them. The nineteenth-

century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history,
and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form,
and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a
mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total com-
position was unaffected by his sexuality . . . Homosexuality ap-
peared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed
from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgy-
ny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a
temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.13
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For much of the twentieth century, homosexuality was

regarded as a mental disorder,14 although Freud had firmly
declared that “homosexual persons are not sick,” for “would
that not oblige us to characterize as sick many great thinkers
and scholars of all times whose perverse orientation we know
for a fact and whom we admire precisely because of their
mental health?”15 Homosexuality was finally removed from
the official listing of mental disorders of the American Psy-
chiatric Association in 1973.16 It is now recognized that some
people have a homosexual orientation, but it is not clear that
a clean line can be drawn between heterosexuals and homo-
sexuals. There is a spectrum of sexual attraction, and attitudes
are heavily influenced by cultural context.17
There are at least some precedents for the modern idea of
a homosexual orientation and way of life in the classical world.
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes offers a playful explana-
tion of three different sexual orientations. The primeval hu-
man being was round, his back and sides forming a circle; he
had four hands and four feet and a head with two faces look-
ing opposite ways. These fearsome primeval beings mounted
an attack on the gods. To subdue them, Zeus cut them in two
and made them walk upright on two legs. This division of the
original human being is the origin of desire:
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat
fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for
his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature
which was once called androgynous are lovers of women . . .
the women who are a section of the woman do not care for
men, but have female attachments . . . But they who are a sec-
tion of the male follow the male, and while they are young,
being slices of the original man, they hang about men and
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embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and
youths, because they have the most manly nature.
Aristophanes defends such people against the charge of

shamelessness and waxes rhapsodic about their love:
And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual
half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of
another sort, the pair are lost in amazement of love and friend-
ship and intimacy, and will not be out of the other’s sight, as I
may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass
their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what
they desire of one another.18
Plato’s categories do not correspond to the modern dis-

tinction between heterosexuals and homosexuals. They distin-
guish love between men from love between women and treat
pederasty, the love of boys by adult men, as a special category.19
Nonetheless, they suggest that sexual orientation is inborn,
determined by a person’s makeup. Such theorizing about sexu-
ality was exceptional in antiquity, however, and is not attested
at all in the Bible.
the evidence of the hebrew bible

Only a few passages in the Hebrew Bible address the question

of same-sex relations. Some are narratives. A story about Lot
in the city of Sodom in Genesis 19 gave rise to the name “sod-
omy” for male homosexual intercourse. Lot, nephew of Abra-
ham, sees two strangers in the city gate. (They turn out to be
angels.) He insists that they come into his house and not spend
the night in the public square. The men of Sodom, however,
surround the house and demand that Lot bring out the strang-
ers “so that we may know them.” “To know” is often used as a
65
euphemism for sex, and Lot’s reaction makes clear that this is
so here: “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.” To
deter them he offers to give them his two virgin daughters,
to do to them as they pleased, but says, “Only do nothing to
these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof”
(Genesis 19:8). Readers have often assumed that the wicked
deed from which Lot wants to deter the men of Sodom is in-
deed sodomy—intercourse with his male guests. The issue is
complicated, however, by a couple of factors. As Lot’s response
makes clear, he, as host, feels responsible for his guests.20 That
the people of Sodom wanted to rape male guests evidently
added to the outrage. But what is involved here is rape. Ac-
cordingly the story says nothing about the permissibility of
consensual sex between males. The idea that it would be worse
to rape a man than to rape a woman persists in Philo, in so-
phisticated circles in Alexandria around the turn of the Com-
mon Era: “If you are guilty of pederasty or adultery or rape of
a young person, even of a female, for I need not mention the
case of a male . . . the penalty is death” (Hypothetica 7.1).21 In-
terestingly, the most explicit statement about the sin of Sodom
in the Hebrew Bible, in Ezekiel 16:49, does not mention sex
at all: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her
daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but
did not aid the poor and needy.” The Epistle of Jude, verse 7,
associates Sodom and Gomorrah with sexual immorality and
says that the residents went after “other flesh,” and 2 Peter
2:6–10 associates them with licentiousness, without further
specification. The “other flesh” in Jude may refer to the flesh
of angels. The earliest author to condemn the Sodomites for
sex between males was Philo of Alexandria (Abraham 135).22
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Lot’s guests were angels, and they could escape by striking

the people of Sodom with blindness. Lot’s daughters suffer no
ill effects. The woman in a related story in Judges 19 is not so
fortunate. She is the concubine of a Levite, who is bringing
her back from Bethlehem to the hill country of Ephraim. He
stops in Gibeah to spend the night, and an old man offers him
hospitality. Again, the men of the city, “a perverse lot,” de-
mand that the stranger be brought out so that they might
“know” him. The host pleads with them not to do such a vile
thing and offers them his virgin daughter and the stranger’s
concubine to ravish or do what they want with them. The
Levite thrusts out his concubine. In the morning the concu-
bine is dead on the doorstep. Here again the story is compli-
cated by the demands of hospitality and the fact that what the
people of the city wanted was rape. Again, the rape of a man
seems to be regarded as worse than the rape of a woman, but
the story does not address the permissibility of consensual
relations.
Also inconclusive is the evidence for homosexual prostitu-
tion in connection with a cult in ancient Israel. Scholars have
speculated that sexual acts were performed with a priest or
a priestess as a way of ensuring fertility. This whole theory of

sacred marriage has fallen into disrepute in recent years, as it
rests on dubious evidence. There are however condemnations
in the Bible of functionaries called qadesh (male) and qedeshah
(female). In Deuteronomy 23:17–18 (Hebrews 23:18–19) we
read:
None of the daughters of Israel shall be a temple prostitute
[qedeshah]; none of the sons of Israel shall be a temple prosti-
tute [qadesh]. You shall not bring the fee of a prostitute or the
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wages of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your

God in payment for any vow, for both of these are abhorrent
to the Lo rd your God.
The word qedeshah is also associated with zonah, “prostitute”

in Genesis 38:21–22 and Hosea 4:14. The Hosea passage
speaks of sacrificing with qedeshoth. The texts give no clear
evidence about the role of the qedeshim.23 They had quarters in
the Jerusalem temple that were destroyed in Josiah’s purge of
the cult (2 Kings 23:7). They appear to have a cultic role that
was unacceptable to the biblical authors, but the evidence is
too unclear to warrant any firm conclusions about their sup-
posed homosexual activity.
The most intriguing story of same-sex love in the Hebrew
Bible is undoubtedly that of David and Jonathan. According
to 1 Samuel 18:1, “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul
of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” In 1 Sam-
uel 19:1–2, Jonathan warned David that his father Saul planned
to kill him because “Jonathan took great delight in David.” In
1 Samuel 20:16–17, Jonathan made a covenant with the house
of David, saying, “May the Lord seek out the enemies of
David.” Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him,
for he loved him as he loved his own life. In 1 Samuel 20:30,

Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan. He said to him:
“You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that
you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and to
the shame of your mother’s nakedness?” Finally, after Saul
and Jonathan are killed in battle with the Philistines, David
mourns Jonathan: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jona-
than; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was
wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26).
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The relationship described in these passages has given

rise to an enormous amount of literature but little consensus.
Interpretation may often be guided by the interpreter’s pre-
disposition on the question of homosexuality. At no point
does the text say explicitly that David and Jonathan had sex.
Accordingly, many commentators see here a case of close
friendship or male bonding. Martti Nissinen, for example,
writes that “it is also possible to interpret David’s and Jona-
than’s love as an intimate camaraderie of two young soldiers
with no sexual involvement.”24 He notes that there is no dis-
tinction of active and passive roles, as we might expect in a
sexual relationship. Famous parallels for intimate male friend-
ship are found in the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from
Mesopotamia, and Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad.
Moreover, the rhetoric of love has roots in discourse about
treaties and covenants in the ancient Near East. Covenant
partners, whether equal or unequal, were said to love each
other and referred to each other using language of kinship,
such as “brother.”25 “Love” in this context essentially meant
“loyalty.” David and Jonathan are explicitly said to have made
a covenant in 1 Samuel 20. David appeals to Jonathan to “deal
kindly with your servant, for you have brought your servant
into a sacred covenant with you” (1 Samuel 20:8). Some com-
mentators consequently suggest that the love has a political
dimension: it prepares the way for David to take over the
kingdom of Saul.26 Two statements in the text, however, sug-
gest a more emotional or erotic relationship. One is Saul’s
complaint that Jonathan has chosen David to his shame and
the shame of his mother’s nakedness. It is possible that the
shame here arises from Jonathan’s disloyalty to his father and
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implicitly to the mother who bore him, but it may also have
sexual implications. The other is David’s statement that the
love of Jonathan was better than the love of women.
Nissinen remarks, aptly enough, that “the text thus leaves
the possible homoerotic associations to the reader’s imagina-
tion.”27 Homosexual love, however, like heterosexual love, is
about much more than sex. It is about bonding, fidelity, and
emotion, all of which seem to be in evidence in the case of
David and Jonathan. Some interpreters assume that the bibli-
cal heroes could not have consummated their love because
“homosexual acts were condemned in Israelite law (Leviticus
20:13). So David’s apologists would hardly have described him
as homosexual or included a piece that described him that
way.”28 But this judgment is problematic on two counts. First,
as we shall see, the condemnation of homosexual acts is found
only in one distinctive strand of biblical law, and it is not at all
certain the author or editor of the books of Samuel would
have been constrained by it. Second, even Leviticus does not
condemn love between males in the emotional sense, and the
specific sex acts that are forbidden are a subject of dispute.
the prohibition in leviticus
Sexual acts between males are explicitly condemned in only

two verses of the Hebrew Bible. Leviticus 18:22 reads: “You
shall not lie with a male the lyings of a woman; it is an abomi-
nation.” Leviticus 20:13 specifies the penalty: “If a man lies with
a male the lyings of a woman, both of them have committed an
abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon
them.” These verses are in the Holiness Code, a subsection of
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the Book of Leviticus and of the Priestly Laws, usually dated to

the Babylonian Exile, although the evidence for dating is not
very clear.
The first question here is what is meant by “the lyings of
a woman.” The corresponding phrase, “the lying of a male,”
occurs a number of times in the books of Numbers and Judg-
es (Numbers 31:17, 18, 35; Judges 21:11–12). In Judges, a virgin
girl is defined as one “who has not known a man with respect
to the lying of a male.” In Numbers as well, a virgin is one
who has not known the lying of a male. The “lying of a male,”
then, appears to mean vaginal intercourse. Saul Olyan argues
by analogy that the “lyings of a woman” must refer to anal
intercourse and that this is the only activity between males
that is prohibited in Leviticus.29 Richard Friedman and Shaw-
na Dolansky, in contrast, note that while “the lying of a male”
is always singular, “the lyings of a woman” are plural. They
infer that more than one kind of sexual activity is involved.30
We might also note that the passages that speak of the lying
of a man speak of the woman “knowing” or experiencing it.
Leviticus speaks rather of a man who lies the lyings of a wom-
an, not of a man who lies the lying of a man with a man. This
might suggest that a man who lies the lyings of a woman is

one who plays the role of the woman in sex. Both partners,
however, are judged worthy of death.
On any interpretation, this law is exceptional in the an-
cient Near East. The only parallel is provided by a Middle
Assyrian law:
If a man lie with his neighbor, when they have prosecuted him
and convicted him, they shall lie with him and turn him into a
eunuch.31
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In this case, however, the issue seems to be the subjugation of

the “neighbor,” presumably a man of equal status, rather than
the homosexual activity, which is repeated in the punishment.
In Greece, it was considered shameful for a man of status to
be penetrated but not to be the penetrator. Plato, in the Laws,
regarded as “womanly” men who played the role of the wom-
an (Laws 837 C), and Plutarch, writing in the Roman era, al-
lowed no respect or friendship to those who played the passive
role (Moralia 768 E). Leviticus, however, condemns both par-
ties to death.
Remarkably there is no law on relations between women.
It can hardly be that love between women was not known in
Israel or Judah. Neither is it the case that the authors were
indifferent to what women did. Leviticus 18:23, the verse im-
mediately after the prohibition against lying with a male, for-
bids relations with an animal but specifies that it is equally
forbidden for a woman to give herself to an animal. So the
question arises, How did sex between males differ from sex
between females?
The obvious answer to this question is that it involved the
ejaculation of semen. This suggests that the problem is waste of
seed. Yet there is no mention of seed in this passage, and other

actions that involve a waste of seed, such as sex with a pregnant
woman, are not prohibited. (Neither is masturbation. The
problem with Onan in Genesis 38 is that he fails to honor the
law of levirate marriage, which required him to raise up a son
for his dead brother.) Alternatively, since a mingling of bodily
fluids is involved, the issue might concern purity, perhaps be-
cause of the mingling of semen and excrement. (Excrement is
not regarded as defiling in biblical law, but Ezekiel expresses
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revulsion when he is asked to cook his food over human dung

in 4:12–13.) So none of the explanations on offer is entirely sat-
isfactory, although each of them may have some validity.
It is important in any case to see these laws in the context
of the Holiness Code and of Leviticus more generally. The
tone for many of the purity laws is set by the list of forbidden
foods in Leviticus 11. An animal that has divided hooves and is
cleft-footed and chews the cud is permitted. Such an animal is
“normal.” But those that chew the cud but do not have divided
hooves (such as the camel) or have divided hooves but do not
chew the cud (such as the pig) are declared unclean. Mary
Douglas famously argued that the problem was that the impure
animals were regarded as anomalous, or rather that anomalous
animals, those that deviated from some norm, were regarded as
impure.32 This kind of reasoning may play a part in the prohibi-
tion of sexual relations between males, but it does not explain
why the prohibition is not extended to women. Relations be-
tween women would seem to be as anomalous as relations
between men.
John Boswell claimed that the Hebrew word toevah, “abom-
ination,” “does not usually signify something intrinsically evil,
like rape or theft . . . but something which is ritually unclean

for Jews, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during
menstruation.33 But this comparison is misleading.34 Leviticus
recognizes occasions of ritual uncleanness that are not sinful,
such as childbirth, seminal emission, heterosexual intercourse,
and menstruation. In these cases, purification is accomplished
through ritual, sacrifice, and washing.35 The word toevah is not
used to refer to them. It is used for a wide range of offenses,
many of them moral in nature (murder, lying, robbery).36
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In the New Testament, Paul dispensed Gentile Christians

from following the food laws of Leviticus. Many of the specific
laws are generally disregarded in the modern world, except by
the ultra-Orthodox. Leviticus 19:19 says, “You shall not let your
animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field
with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of
two different materials.” Few people in the modern world re-
gard these commandments as binding. This does not mean
that all commandments in Leviticus can be disregarded. Moral
laws such as we find in the Ten Commandments are inter-
spersed with the ritual laws of Leviticus 19. But the mixture
shows that laws are not automatically binding because they are
found in the Bible. Anyone who argues that Leviticus 18:22 is
binding but 19:19 is not needs to provide a rationale.
The most striking thing about the Hebrew Bible on the
subject of same-sex relations, however, is how little it has to
say on the subject. The prophets have nothing to say about it.
Neither do the sages who compiled the Wisdom Literature
(Job, Proverbs, Qoheleth [Ecclesiastes]) or the scribes who
edited Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History. That
the subject is addressed explicitly in only two verses, in a dis-
tinctive strand of Priestly Law, shows that it is a marginal

concern in the Hebrew Bible.
the new testament
In the New Testament, too, we find large swathes of material

that do not address same-sex relations at all. Jesus never
touches on the subject in any of the Gospels.37 The exceptions
are in the writings of Paul. The most important passage is
74
found in Romans 1. The passage begins by declaring that the

wrath of God is revealed from heaven against those who sup-
press the truth. Ever since the creation, the power and nature
of God have been visible through the things he has made.
Therefore, those who do not acknowledge him are without
excuse. Paul draws here on an argument that is also found in
the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish Hellenistic work from the
early first century CE. The Wisdom of Solomon is more
sympathetic than Paul to the Gentiles, allowing that they may
have tried to find God but gone astray. Paul regards them as
culpable. Because they failed to acknowledge God, God pun-
ished them. The manner of punishment is startling:
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions.
Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,
and in the same way also the men, giving up natural inter-
course with women, were consumed with passion for one an-
other. Men committed shameless acts with men and received
in their own persons the due penalty for their error. (Romans
1:26–27)
Same-sex relations here are said to be a punishment: God

gave Gentiles up to their lusts. The punishment consists in
deviation from nature, from the order of creation.
natural and unnatural
Paul enters here into a discourse on nature that had a long

history in Greek philosophy, dating back to the Sophists in
the fifth century, and no precedent in the Hebrew Bible.
While Plato had written positively about homosexual rela-
tions in the Symposium, in his last work, the Laws, he wrote:
75
I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises

out of the intercourse between men and women, but that the
intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is
contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally
due to unbridled lust. (1.636)
Later he adduces the animals as proof that such unions

were monstrous, although the behavior of animals was a matter
of dispute (4.836).38 In Greco-Roman culture generally, “natu-
ral” sexual relations involved a superior active partner and an
inferior passive partner (boys, women, slaves). Sexual relations
between women, accordingly, were “unnatural.”39 The contrast
between “in accordance with nature” and “contrary to nature”
figures prominently in Greco-Roman popular philosophy.
For example, a character in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love dispar-
ages union with males as contrary to nature, as contrasted
with the love between men and women, characterized as
natural.40
Hellenistic Jewish literature generally maintained a hard
line against same-sex relations, especially relations between
males. One of the most explicit passages on the subject is
found in Pseudo-Phocylides, a collection of moralizing say-
ings that probably dates to the first century CE:
Do not outrage your wife for shameful ways of intercourse.

Do not transgress the natural limits of sexuality for
unlawful sex,
For even animals are not pleased by intercourse of male
with male,
And let not women imitate the sexual role of men.
Do not deliver yourself wholly unto unbridled sensuality
towards your wife.
For eros is not a god, but a passion destructive of all.
(189–94)41
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Philo of Alexandria uses the expression “contrary to na-

ture” (para physin) with reference to relations between a man
and a woman in her menstrual period, relations between a
man and a boy, and relations between different species of ani-
mals (Special Laws 3.7–82). His primary concerns seem to
be for procreation and clear distinctions between species.42
Josephus writes:
The Law recognizes no sexual connections, except the natural
union of man and wife, and that only for the procreation of
children. But it abhors the intercourse of males with males and
punishes any who undertake such a thing with death. (Against
Apion 2.199, trans. Thackeray)43
In Paul’s time, the categorization of same-sex relations as para

physin was commonplace in the world of Hellenistic Juda-
ism.44 Paul writes in a Hellenistic Jewish cultural context.
While various female acts (or even positions) might be
construed as imitating the sexual role of men, and therefore as
unnatural, most interpreters agree that Paul is referring to sex
between women in Romans 1:26. The word “likewise” in the
following verse clearly refers to sex between men. Moreover,
this is the type of sexual relations most frequently called con-
trary to nature in the contemporary Greco-Roman litera-

ture.45 It seems clear, then, that Paul condemns lesbianism as
well as male homoerotic relations.
Some interpreters have suggested that Paul was objecting
only to heterosexuals who performed homosexual acts.46 But
Paul does not recognize homosexuals as a category at all. For
him everyone is heterosexual, and all homosexual acts are ex-
pressions of lust. This understanding is deficient by modern
lights, but the apostle was a man of his time. Again, others
77
have suggested that Paul’s objection was to sex between men

and boys, which is normally understood as abuse in the mod-
ern world but was widely practiced in Greek and Roman cul-
ture.47 But Paul, like Leviticus, holds both active and passive
parties equally responsible and liable for the death penalty.
Unlike Philo, Paul was not concerned about procreation, as we
shall see in the next chapter. Neither was he concerned about
purity laws, such as those involving menstruating women. He
may well have been influenced by the prohibition of sex be-
tween males in Leviticus, and he was surely influenced by
Greco-Roman conceptions of what was natural and unnatural.
But Paul’s attempt to argue on the basis of nature is not
very satisfactory. As the classical scholar John J. Winkler com-
ments with regard to distinctions of natural and unnatural in
Greek culture, “what ‘natural’ means in many such contexts is
precisely ‘conventional and proper.’ The word ‘unnatural’ in
contexts of human behavior quite regularly means ‘seriously
unconventional.’ ”48 The point can be illustrated easily from
1 Corinthians 11, where Paul strains to make an argument that
any woman who prays or prophesies should veil her head.
“Judge for yourself,” he writes. “Is it proper for a woman to
pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself
teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him,
but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is
given to her for a covering” (11:13–15). But nature teaches this
only in specific cultural contexts. In the United States, nature
stopped teaching that long hair was degrading for a man in the
1960s (except for the Okies from Muskogee of Merle Hag-
gard’s song). Paul himself seems to have sensed the weakness of
his argument, for he concludes: “But if anyone is disposed to
78
be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches

of God.” Custom, not nature, is what was at stake, and this was
no less true in Romans 1 on the subject of same-sex relations.
the greek terms arsenokoitai

and malakoi
Apart from the passage in Romans, the only other passages

in the New Testament that condemn same-sex relations are
1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. As translated in the
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), 1 Corin-
thians 6:9–10 reads:
Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the king-
dom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters,
adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy,
drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the
kingdom of God.
The Greek word translated here as “male prostitutes” is

malakoi, literally “soft people (masculine).” To call them “male
prostitutes” is clearly an overinterpretation. The word is
widely used and with a wide range of meanings. A male who
allowed himself to be penetrated might be characterized as
“soft,” but the word cannot be restricted to this meaning. In a

sexual context, it means “effeminate.”49 It is unlikely, howev-
er, that Paul was condemning people for their disposition or
just for an effeminate lifestyle. He most probably used the
word in its narrower sense of passive sexual partner.
The Greek word translated as “sodomite” in the NRSV,
arsenokoitai, is more controversial. It recurs in the list of evildo-
ers in 1 Timothy 1:10. The Greek word is a compound of arsen,
79
“male,” and koite, “bed.” John Boswell argued that the first
term denotes the subject, and so the sense would be “a male
lying,” that is, a man having intercourse, suggesting a fornica-
tor or a male prostitute.50 But the word is probably coined on
the basis of the Greek translation of Leviticus 20:13: meta arse-
nos koiten gynaikos (with a male, the couch of a woman).51 The
objection is raised that the meaning of a word is not necessar-
ily determined by its etymology. In Sibylline Oracles 2.70–77 the
verb arsenokeitein occurs in connection with other terms that
relate to injustice rather than to sexual offenses.52 But the Sibyl-
line Oracles regularly include male homosexual relations in lists
of vices. In Sibylline Oracles 3.185 the vice is expressed as “male
will approach male.” In Sibylline Oracles 3.595–96 the Jews are
praised because they “are mindful of holy wedlock and do not
engage in impious intercourse with male children.” Again, in
Sibylline Oracles 3.764 the Sibyl urges people to “avoid adultery
and indiscriminate intercourse with males.” Since warnings
against male homosexual intercourse is a topos in Sibylline lit-
erature, there can be little doubt about the meaning of arseno-
koitai in Sibylline Oracles 2 or indeed in Paul. The word suggests
an allusion to Leviticus, but Paul’s position on the subject is
absolutely in conformity with the prevalent position in Helle-

nistic Judaism.
In the New Testament, as in the Old, we find explicit condem-

nation of homosexual acts, but only in a few passages, in the
Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistles.53 Neither Jesus nor the
evangelists have anything at all to say on the subject, which
should raise questions about the importance of homosexuality
as an issue in the biblical world. Moreover, Paul’s comments
80
are clearly indebted to the Hellenistic cultural context and to

the assumptions of Hellenistic Jews. The Bible provides no
direct support for gay rights in a modern context. Anyone
who wishes to use the Bible to argue for gay rights would have
to argue from the general command to love our neighbor and
would then have to face the difficulties of determining what
love of the neighbor requires. Conversely, the explicit biblical
condemnations of homosexual activity are confined to narrow
strands of tradition in both Testaments. Modern discussions
of gender and sexuality provide a very different context for
this issue than is envisioned in the Bible. Many other consid-
erations besides the few scriptural passages we have discussed
would have to be taken into account in a responsible discus-
sion of the ethics of homosexuality.
81

What Are Biblical Values What The Bible Says On Ke... - (CHAPTER THREE The Bible and Gender)

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CHAPTER THREE

The Bible and Gender

We are given little by way of context to explain what it

age” is commonly used for a statue. Gods were normally rep-

the visible form of a deity on earth. Mesopotamian kings were

The midrash Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic commentary from

It is generally accepted that adam is the generic Hebrew

inclusive humanity but sometimes as the proper name of a

the assumption that human beings must be unambiguously

should dress, wear their hair, and comport themselves.9 Dif-

The supposed biblical view that marriage is between a man

more than the judicial subject of them. The nineteenth-

For much of the twentieth century, homosexuality was

Aristophanes defends such people against the charge of

Plato’s categories do not correspond to the modern dis-

the evidence of the hebrew bible

Only a few passages in the Hebrew Bible address the question

Lot’s guests were angels, and they could escape by striking

a priestess as a way of ensuring fertility. This whole theory of

wages of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your

The word qedeshah is also associated with zonah, “prostitute”

for he loved him as he loved his own life. In 1 Samuel 20:30,

The relationship described in these passages has given

the prohibition in leviticus

Sexual acts between males are explicitly condemned in only

the Book of Leviticus and of the Priestly Laws, usually dated to

might suggest that a man who lies the lyings of a woman is

In this case, however, the issue seems to be the subjugation of

seed. Yet there is no mention of seed in this passage, and other

revulsion when he is asked to cook his food over human dung

like rape or theft . . . but something which is ritually unclean

In the New Testament, Paul dispensed Gentile Christians

tinctive strand of Priestly Law, shows that it is a marginal

the new testament

In the New Testament, too, we ﬁnd large swathes of material

found in Romans 1. The passage begins by declaring that the

Same-sex relations here are said to be a punishment: God

natural and unnatural

Paul enters here into a discourse on nature that had a long

I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises

Later he adduces the animals as proof that such unions

Do not outrage your wife for shameful ways of intercourse.

Philo of Alexandria uses the expression “contrary to na-

In Paul’s time, the categorization of same-sex relations as para

trary to nature in the contemporary Greco-Roman litera-

have suggested that Paul’s objection was to sex between men

be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches

the greek terms arsenokoitai

Apart from the passage in Romans, the only other passages

The Greek word translated here as “male prostitutes” is

“soft,” but the word cannot be restricted to this meaning. In a

absolutely in conformity with the prevalent position in Helle-

In the New Testament, as in the Old, we ﬁnd explicit condem-

are clearly indebted to the Hellenistic cultural context and to

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